Dormant Seeds
by Lyre of Sheliak
Summary: Seeds can lie dormant a long time before sprouting. Dreaming of Sunshine recursive fanfic, written for WDLF2 for wafflelate and inspired by "The Art of Losing" by wafflelate.


Shikako and Kakashi are almost back to the Dead Wastes when Shikako senses the ROOT team following them. "Incoming," she says, although Kakashi had already picked up on her unease, started scanning the trees around them.

The first ROOT nin dies before he even has a chance to jump at them. The second and third aren't much more trouble.

It's odd that Kakashi hadn't killed any of them, when normally he's equally driven to defend her and to prove his usefulness. But when she turns from her dead opponents to his living one, it makes sense.

They're fighting seriously, but Kakashi, at least, isn't going for the kill. And that means a lot, with his history. With how protective he's been.

At first glance, the man he's fighting is just another ROOT agent. She doesn't recognize his chakra—but considering what ROOT, this ROOT especially, does to its members' chakra, she probably wouldn't recognize anyone that she knew less well than Kakashi.

(She wonders if she knew the people she just killed, and hopes that she doesn't. But she has no intention of removing the corpses' masks to make sure. They're all too old to be Sai, she's sure of that, and that will have to be enough.)

The fact that Kakashi isn't actually trying to kill him is a clue to his identity, one that's reinforced when she sees the final ROOT ninja hesitate long enough to lose the opportunity for a killing blow and confirmed when he uses the Mokuton to attack her.

Shikako lets the branches pass through her chest, sends her shadow-self surging along their undersides until she reaches him and forms a shadow hand to plant a knockout tag on his masked brow. He goes down, and Shikako coalesces next to him.

Kakashi seems surprised that she hadn't gone for the kill. Relieved, Shikako thinks, but also confused.

"Why?" Kakashi asks.

The question is such a _relief_, after this Kakashi obeyed her silently for so long. Shikako treasures his questions.

And this one makes sense. She just got through killing a whole team of ROOT agents. What's one more?

But he's familiar. She knows she won't be seeing her own Tenzō again, doesn't have to think of how it would be to see him and know she'd killed his double—but she feels like she knows this man, knows the name he does not have, the history that hasn't played out. She doesn't want to kill him.

And he'd hesitated for a moment, a split second, fighting Kakashi. He hadn't wanted to kill him. And Kakashi definitely knows him too, from the mess of emotion she can feel from him.

If he knows this version of Tenzō—if they still care about each other, despite the lengths this world's Danzō has gone to to make that impossible in ROOT—that is a bond Shikako will fight to keep alive.

"He's your teammate, right?" And team comes first, before the mission, before your own safety, before _anything_. That's something their worlds have in common—her sensei's code, Uchiha Obito's legacy.

Kakashi doesn't hesitate. "No. You are."

The emotion transfer from the bond says otherwise. Kakashi's attenuated emotions are a mess of fear (for Tenzō? Of disappointing her?) and guilt (for caring about someone who isn't her?)

That she can feel those emotions is a good sign, probably. It's still overwhelming, just now, and it doesn't help her figure out what to say to him. "That wasn't… that wasn't a test. You care about him, so we're keeping him alive." End of discussion.

Kakashi looks (feels, his emotions spreading along the bond) confused. Like his feelings, his other relationships, can't possibly matter. There's a thread of relief there, but almost swallowed by the rest of it.

That's too much to deal with right now, so she doesn't try. Shikako kneels by Tenzō instead, running a diagnostic jutsu—she has a pretty good idea by now of just how bad ROOT medical care is, and she wants to know if he's injured _before_ she tries to move him.

She finds only minor bruises and abrasions. Nothing immediately dangerous; there's one cut that she'd like to fix, but it can wait until he's awake. There are minor signs of malnutrition, which is odd, but then again Danzō never did bother taking good care of his "tools".

Medical exam over, she sighs and begins to tie him up. Hopefully that won't be necessary for long, but right now it is. "I'll remove the seal on his tongue when we make camp," she says.

Before… _back home_, she wouldn't have performed surgery like that without her subject's consent. But they're here alone, without a village, vulnerable, and that seal is dangerous to him and them. It has to come off, _now_. (And she's already done the same for Kakashi. _To_ Kakashi, though he'd never dream of blaming her for it.) The cut, she'll ask about. It feels like a sop to her feelings more than an actual concession to ethics.

After that… well, they'll cross that bridge when they come to it.

Kakashi hoists his friend (she hopes his friend, she wants this Kakashi to have a friend so badly) on his shoulders, and they start off again.

— — —

Shikako removes Tenzō's seal as soon as they make it to the Garden. It goes straightforwardly enough, as far as Kakashi can tell, although he's hardly an expert.

Kakashi studies the sealing textbook as she works. He struggles to focus, distracted by worry and guilt and things he can't name, but he manages to keep out of the way until Shikako says she's done.

Almost without a break, she moves to untie him.

"He may be hostile when he wakes," Kakashi tells her, reluctantly.

"Sure," she replies, unworried. "But Gelel and I can drain his chakra if he is, without hurting him." She shrugs. Here, in the heart of Gelel's power—and her own—she fears no one and nothing.

Unlike Kakashi, his kohai does not wake immediately after the seal is removed, although the knockout tag is gone as well. Maybe Shikako changed the process; maybe he's simply reacting differently to it. In either case, Kakashi keeps a Sharingan eye on him while he helps Shikako prepare dinner.

Kakashi's kohai wakes while Kakashi is chopping vegetables. Despite the lack of restraints, he stays where he is, unmoving and tense. Terrified.

"Did you know him in your world?" Kakashi asks her, much to give his kohai time as anything else. Shikako will have _noticed_, she's a sensor and his bondmate, but for now she seems content to ignore her… prisoner?

"Not well." She pauses as she finishes adding the vegetables to tonight's stewpot. "But he was my sensei's friend." She doesn't say anything further, just stares into the stewpot like it contains something more interesting than good food.

She's making more food than usual. Kakashi tries not to make assumptions, but… "May I share my meal with him?"

Kakashi knows he's being overly bold, but it will probably be all right; Shikako hasn't objected to boldness in the past.

And it's been a very long time since Kakashi's kohai ate something other than ration bars. If he ever has at all.

She meets his eyes and smiles. "I'm making enough for all of us."

— — —

He wakes slowly, overwhelmed by emotion, drowning in unfamiliar chakra. Immediately he knows: the seal is gone.

He is unrestrained, which would be a good sign under different circumstances. As it is, he suspects that his captors simply know he won't be capable of fighting back.

His former senpei is standing several meters away, near the shinobi who defeated him. They're talking, although he can't make out their words without diverting chakra to his ears. He doesn't have the control to do that, just now, and even if he did, the unknown shinobi is a sensor. He doesn't want to draw her attention.

He risks opening his eyes.

He's in a small building with stone walls and a stone roof, lit by unfamiliar seals. In fact, it's covered with seals, and _none_ of them are familiar.

He remembers a hand made of shadow reaching out to touch him, and nothing after that. A seal. Laid with a touch.

Adrift in strange chakra as he is, he can't tell if the room has grown colder or if it's simply his fear.

His captor is a seal master. A seal master, and she took him alive.

The best case is that she intends to torture him for information, but that is unlikely.

(His senpei her ally will have told her that he knows nothing of use.)

He lies there, staring at the glowing seals.

Someone—his senpei, he thinks, using the familiar title despite everything—is coming nearer. He sits up, his back to a corner.

He was right; it's his senpei. He's carrying two bowls of stew. Hands one of them to his kohai and keeps the other for himself, just as they'd done so many times with rations in ROOT.

They eat, without speaking. (The food in ROOT was never this good.)

"She's my soulmate," his senpeisays at last. Explanation and apology, and that is more than he could have expected.

If his… no, if _Kakashi_ has a soulmate, a real person…

No wonder he left. It is what he should want for him, surely.

He could attack, and does not. What point would there be?

There is nothing he can do. There never has been.

At least his senpei will be all right.

— — —

Tenzō tenses when Shikako walks in the doorway. She expected that. She can feel him reaching for Mokuton, and reaches out to Gelel in case he tries to attack. (She won't hold it against him if he does.)

He doesn't, though. Just sits there staring at her.

She sits down across from him, both closer to Kakashi than they are to each other.

"Do you have a name?" she asks.

He stays blank and silent. Like Kakashi, all that time ago.

"If you _don't_ have a name, I'm still going to need to call you something." She hesitates. "Is 'Tenzō' okay?"

That name makes him close up even tighter, as if she's stumbled on a secret she has no way of knowing. Well, maybe she has. But it's the only name she has for him, and it's not as if she can take her words back.

"Um. You can go anywhere in the oasis, but leaving it is dangerous. We're still in the Dead Wastes, and the chakra-draining zone is deadly. It acts faster if you're _using _chakra, but anyone who goes too far into the waste without me as a guide will die."

She pauses. "I can heal that cut," she says carefully. "Or I can give you the supplies to tend it yourself. Your choice."

He's quiet a long time before he says, "I can do it myself."

She snatches the medical kit she'd put together out of hammerspace and hands it to him. He seems surprised, and somehow she doesn't think it's the technique that did it. But he takes the kit.

It's a start.

— — —

Shikako didn't know the Tenzō back home very well, is the thing. Or at all, really, although she'd probably have spent more time with him eventually if she'd… stayed. (Another version of her will have that chance. _One_ of her infinite reflections is home now, in her village, with her team and her family and her Tenzō as well. That has to be enough, because this Shikako isn't leaving this world.) She'd met iterations of him in other worlds, other times, but she had never been all that close to one of them. (One of him?) This should be easy. Comparatively speaking.

It's not.

Seeing Kakashi like this had been worse, of course, because she had known him so many times, and knew exactly how wrong his quiet compliance was. But as painfully slow as Kakashi's recovery had been, it had _happened_, is still happening.

Tenzō is just as horrifyingly blank as this Kakashi had been when she'd first found him, and removing his seal hasn't helped nearly as much. She'd known that the bond with her was helping Kakashi, but until now she hadn't realized how _much_.

Tenzō doesn't have a bondmate; he doesn't have another person's emotions linked to his to kickstart his recovery, and based on how Kakashi had described the mechanics of bonding, he likely won't even be able to form one right now. (Maybe a small, half-strength one would be possible, even if a full bond isn't? But it isn't as if Shikako could _make_ one happen.) He doesn't have dogs to remind him of a past life. Shikako is pretty sure he didn't have a life before ROOT to be reminded of. There is no baseline for him to return to.

Is all of this universe's ROOT like this? She tries not to think of Sai, to wonder if even Naruto could get through to the version of him in this world. The idea that this Kakashi is actually a best case scenario was kind of horrifying.

Shikako was already planning on taking Danzō down. With the Third dead (and she can't really bring herself to feel sorry about that, even on behalf of this world's Naruto), that should even be relatively simple. She's killed Danzō before, after all; even if no one here can manage it, she knows she can. It's oddly reassuring to have that familiar goal, like magnetic north. It hadn't exactly been a constant in her travels—sometimes he'd been dead already, or not born, or she'd simply avoided getting involved—but it had never _not_ been a good idea.

Statistically speaking, there's probably a universe where killing Danzō would not, in fact, make things better. Some other version of herself is probably even there now, trying to make sense of her life.

At least she isn't dealing with _that_. This world made much more sense.

Here and now, she's got two traumatized ex-ROOT agents to worry about. One of them is her soulmate; the other isn't. That's the situation she has to work with.

Kakashi is getting better. Tenzō will as well.

Kakashi cares about him, and he cares back. Even with the seal, they did. That's something. A _big_ thing, with what ROOT is like.

They're going to need time, and that's something she can give them.

— — —

It's a few weeks later that Tenzō asks her his first question.

"If we're in the middle of the Dead Wastes, how did you grow these plants?" He indicates the trees around them.

"There were seeds here, before the dragon vein was dammed. They were still here when I woke Gelel. Animals and plants need chakra to live, but seeds can just… wait for a better time. As long as this area was dead, they couldn't grow, but they didn't die, either. Didn't rot. So they were still here, dormant, for me to wake up."

Like some other things.


End file.
